Looking for the latest product release information from Get Satisfaction? We’re constantly working on new features and products, and we release software into production multiple times every month. For example, today we released several new features and updates to our new Community Web Application (currently in Beta) and our Manage Workspace. You can read about today’s release here.

To get details on all the new stuff, please follow the Release Notes category in our own community. We post our updates there, and when you follow the category, you’ll get an email when there’s something new.

Note that we no longer use this product blog to provide updates on product releases—we’re using our own Get Satisfaction Community for that purpose.

We’re very excited to announce the release of a brand new application for business users, built and optimized for the work you do in the community every day! The Manage Workspace, the first of several workspaces we’re adding to the Community Management Console, lets you moderate, curate, respond to, and create conversations in the community all within one space. This application is now available to all business users who have a management seat at no additional cost. Read on to learn how the Manage Workspace organizes community management functions in one place, simplifies moderation, and enhances your productivity.

Why is moderation important to your community?

Communities are invaluable assets for support, product, and marketing teams because they put the voice of the customer squarely in the middle of your organization and they are a crowd sourced content generation machine. Community members and company representatives generate fresh content that answers questions, provides feedback, and builds knowledge. But this content is only useful if the quality is high and customers can easily find it! Activities like providing thoughtful and timely replies, merging conversations that discuss the same topic, splitting divergent replies into new conversations, and archiving conversations that are no longer relevant keeps your community tuned and effective. With the new Manage Workspace, you have a more powerful tool to do so.

Multiple workspaces to manage your community

We’re building a set of tools–Workspaces–for business users, and collectively they make up our new Community Management Console. They are:

Manage Workspace–all-new and the first in the suite, a comprehensive tool for managing community content

Analyze Workspace–home to Community Health Analytics, and future home of new reports, dashboards, and insights

Manage workspace is the first workspace that is showcased in this release. Content visibility and management are critical for successful communities. While keeping this in mind, we wanted to provide business users with a simple and easy-to-use application that would assist them in reaching this goal. Manage workspace provides a unified view of community content with all management capabilities built in.

Manage workspace key wins

There are three important capabilities this workspace offers.

1. View the content that matters to you

Community managers, product managers, support managers all have different priorities when it comes to the community. Manage Workspace is designed to let different business users filter community content to meet their needs. You can filter by conversation type, sentiment, state, date range, tag, and moderation status. If you’re a support manager and you want to see only problems created today that have no employee response, you can do so. If you’re a product manager and want to see ideas for your product created this week, you can do that too. If you want to see questions that have been tagged as “pre-sales” and include the name of your competitor, you can even do that.

2. Perform all moderation functions from one place

Manage Workspace is designed to perform all moderation and curation functions. You no longer need to jump between the management view and the community application to compose new conversations and company updates, reply to conversations, merge, fork, archive, categorize and tag. Having all this power in one place makes your work more efficient.

3. Quickly jump between overview and detail

Content is shown in a familiar overview table of filtered results (you can even customize the columns shown in the overview grid), but with a single click you can drill into the conversation details. You can perform bulk operations (like archive) on selected conversations from the overview, then drill in to see all replies, comments, tags and category settings.

Access Manage Workspace today!

All Employees and Champions who have a Management Seat are able to access the Manage Workspace via the Manage item in the community navigation bar.

What’s Next?

Manage Workspace is a full featured application that will provide you a ton of value right away. But we’re not done! Not only will we be adding new features to this workspace, but we’ll also be adding people management soon. Using the same filtered view facility from content management, you will be able to filter and view information about your community members. Stay tuned for more details on the upcoming enhancements to the Community Management Console!

We just rolled out some great improvements to our mobile that we hope increases transparency and makes it easier to engage in conversations. Read on to learn how the mobile experience now lets you see who’s behind the numbers, edit your own content, and better engage with others via comments.

See Who’s Behind the Me-Too, Follower, and Star Counts

Your users are naturally curious about who else is in the community and what they think. Who agreed with this idea? Who liked this reply? Who’s following this problem? We’ve displayed counts for quite some time showing the number of other users that have me-too’d a conversation, that are following a conversation, or that have starred replies. The people behind those numbers will no longer be a mystery to your end-users. They can now view a list of the users behind each of those actions in our mobile experience. This has been a long-requested feature that adds important transparency to the conversations happening in your community.

Editing Your Own Content

We all make typos and mistakes sometimes. That’s why we’ve added the ability for your users to edit and remove the content that they’ve posted in a conversation. They can now edit or remove their conversations, replies, or comments until someone else has replied to them.

Improved Comment Interaction

Comments are an important part of the conversation. When users want to clarify another user’s reply, they can chime in with a comment. We now display comments expanded by default if there are less than four comments on a reply and will show the first and last comment if there are four or more with the ability to expand the rest inline.

What Do You Think?

We hope you like these improvements! As always, let us know what you think in our community.

It’s been over a month since we released a major update to our new mobile experience. During that time, we’ve been hard at work making a lot of exciting changes to the application that we just released today. Read on to learn how the mobile experience now includes updated designs and interactions, a new flat design aesthetic, and lots of additional data to support transparency and drive discovery.

Updated Design and Interactions

We made several layout and design changes to the application to improve on the importance and ordering of content, to help users better focus on the task at hand, and to improve the reply and comment interactions.

Modified Layout: The layout of many pages has been changed to reflect the relative importance of content. For instance, on the conversation page, we made the title of the conversation the first and most prominent element. We also made navigation elements much more prominent and used a consistent style for them.

Sticky Header: To keep users in context, you’ll now see a sticky header that appears on conversations, when users are searching, and when users are previewing a new conversation.

Reply and Comment Interactions: Users are no longer taken to a separate page to view comments. We’re planning to display some comments by default as well in an upcoming release. You’ll also notice a new interaction approach for starring a reply. Users now “Like” a reply.

New Flat Design

We updated the visual design of the app to use a flat design aesthetic and a simpler color palette and font set. There’s a general trend with modern applications to using a flatter visual style that doesn’t include gradients, shadows, and other embellishments in the UI. This is often referred to as “flat design”. It embraces and tries to leverage the constraints of the physical devices we use rather than trying to work around them. The result is a design that feels crisper and allows users to focus on the task at hand rather than being distracted by unnecessary decoration. We’ve fully embraced this trend and you’ll see the new design reflects that.

As part of the re-design, we also simplified the color palette and font set. There are now only a handful of primary colors (eight) and font styles (four sizes) used throughout the entire design. Having fewer colors and fonts dramatically reduces the visual noise of the page, keeping users from getting distracted. We also wanted the attention and “color” of the community to come from user-generated content rather than the application itself. So you’ll see that trend reflected in much of the design.

Additional Data to Support Transparency and Discovery

We added additional data to help provide transparency into who’s participating in the community as well as to encourage discovery of new content.

Mini-Profile: Your users can now tap on any avatar image or username in the application and see a mini-profile highlighting that contributors reputation and stats in the community, including how many conversations and replies they’ve posted as well as the number of stars they’ve received. Over time, we’ll be adding a link to the user’s full profile page as well.

Employee and Champion List: Your users can now see which employees and champions are participating in the community by viewing a list of them on the About the Community page. We also include some stats to highlight how active those users are.

Federated Search: If you have federated search enabled for your community, users will now see those results surfaced when they search for conversations. Federated search is a great way for you to surface content from your existing systems (e.g. knowledge base, help site, etc.). These results appear behind the “More” tab in search results.

Recent Conversations in Category Lists: We now display the three most recently active conversations for a category when listing categories on the community homepage or on the full category list. This gives users a preview of the types of discussions happening in a given category and aids in discovery of new content.

What Do You Think?

We’re excited with this new look of the app. We hope you like it too! As always, let us know what you think in our community.

I’m very pleased to announced that our Engage Widgets are now available in all 11 of our supported languages! Communities using our localization feature can now take advantage of our configurable, embeddable widget technology in their preferred language.

As a reminder, localization is available for Small Business and Enterprise plans. Engage Widgets are available for all plans.

Let’s take a look at some things you’ll need to know about localization for Engage Widgets:

New for localized communities

In the Admin section, you’ll now see both a link on the left navigation and a big purple banner across the top that will take you to our Engage Widget configuration tool. As is the case with our other admin features, this tool is only available in English.

Click the link or the banner to get to the Engage Widgets configuration tool.

(If for whatever reason you still want to access our legacy widgets, you can do so by expanding the small black arrow next to the Engage Widgets link in the left navigation bar. We do not plan to localize our legacy widgets.)

Pre-defined Default text

Whether you’re starting a widget configuration from scratch or using one of our existing templates, some of the section headers and sub headers start with some default text in English. You can set these yourself as you see fit.

Some text like these column headers user defined.

Additionally, if you’re using the feedback tab, you can set the text of that tab here:

You can set the text of the feedback tab here.

Previewing your widget

The widget preview is an accurate representation (including your community’s real data) of how the widget will look to your end users, so you can poke around and make sure it’s set up to your liking.

Preview of a widget configuration in Spanish

Preview of a conversation inside a widget in Spanish

Widgets will be in your community’s set language

Any Engage Widgets you create will automatically inherit the language setting of your community. For example, if you configure a widget while your community is in English, and then change your community to Spanish later, your widget will automatically be converted to be in Spanish.

This also means that you will not be able to have widgets in different languages for any single community.